No admission enquiry left waiting. From first call to confirmed seat.
Admission enquiry management for Indian schools, from the front desk to the student record. Walk-ins, phone calls and online admission form entries land in one pipeline, counsellors get follow-ups and a response alarm, and parents book school visits themselves. Offers, registration fees and the final admission stay on the same trail, with nothing typed twice.
Admission season before school admission management software
Ask a principal why she started looking at school admission management software and the story usually begins on a Saturday in January. The front office of a CBSE school in Indore has a hardbound enquiry register, one landline and the admission counsellor's own mobile, ringing since eight. A father walks in asking about Nursery. Another parent calls about Class 6. A mother who filled the enquiry form on the school website on Thursday night is still waiting for a call back, because that form lands in an inbox nobody opens on Fridays. The counsellor writes what she can in the register and promises herself she will call everyone on Monday.
Monday brings fee collection and a parent-teacher meeting. Nobody refuses those families; nobody calls them either. By Wednesday the mother from Thursday night has paid the registration fee at the school two kilometres away, the one that replied on WhatsApp within the hour. When the principal asks how many Nursery enquiries came in this month, three people give three different numbers. When a family is finally admitted, the office types the same child's details three times: into the enquiry register, the admission form and the fee register. The most expensive cost stays invisible. In April the school finds empty seats in classes it advertised on hoardings, while the families who wanted them sit forgotten in a notebook.
If this sounds like your January, the problem is not effort. An enquiry with no owner, no next follow-up date and no written trail is an admission the school has already lost. Inkwelly Admissions & CRM gives every enquiry all three, from the first call to the day the child becomes a student record.
What Inkwelly Admissions & CRM actually replaces
Admissions & CRM covers everything before a child is admitted: the first enquiry, the follow-up calls, the campus visit, the online application, the documents, the offer, the registration fee and, finally, the step that creates the student record. It replaces the enquiry register, the reminders that live in a counsellor's memory, the sheet of visit timings, the printed form that gets retyped and the Monday-morning headcount. Every enquiry gets a number, an owner, a stage and a timeline of every conversation with the family and what happens next.
It is deliberately separate from the student record. Once a family accepts an offer, one step hands everything over to Student Information, where the child's profile and documents live for as long as they study with you. Schools that admit a child directly across the counter can keep using the Student Information admission form, with its own AI auto-fill for admission forms. Admissions & CRM is for what comes before: the families you still have to win.
What the admission office stops doing
- Writing enquiries into a register that nobody can search by phone number, class or date
- Keeping follow-up reminders in a counsellor's head, a diary or sticky notes on the monitor
- Calling families from a personal mobile, so the history leaves with the counsellor
- Reading out visit timings on the phone and hoping the family remembers which Saturday
- Retyping the same child's name, date of birth and parents' details into three different forms
- Chasing parents on WhatsApp to find out whether the birth certificate was ever submitted
- Sending offer letters as photos of a typed page and losing track of who accepted
- Matching registration fee payments against the enquiry register at the end of the day
- Counting enquiries by hand every Monday because the principal wants numbers by class
- Guessing whether the hoarding, the newspaper insert or referrals brought families in
The admission enquiry management screens your team will use
This is not an enquiry form bolted onto a fee module. It is a working desk for the admission season, used by the front office all day, the counsellor between calls, the accountant when a payment arrives and the principal every morning. Every screen below exists in Inkwelly today, in English and Hindi, and shows each person only what their role allows. Most of them also work from the Inkwelly staff app, so a counsellor can capture a walk-in or check in a visiting family away from a desk.
Everything the admission desk works from
Admissions dashboard
One morning screen for the principal and coordinator: enquiries still waiting for a first response, overdue follow-ups, today's follow-ups, this week's enquiries by source, visits booked for today and tomorrow, and families at each stage.
Walk-in enquiry at the counter
Child's name, class, parent, mobile number and source, filled while the parent is still at the desk. A matching mobile number is flagged before a duplicate is created, and a printable enquiry slip is ready for the family.
Pipeline board and table
Drag enquiries across New, Contacted, Visit booked and Visited, or switch to a table filtered by stage, source, class, counsellor, untouched or overdue. Assign selected rows in bulk, or export the filtered list.
Family timeline
Every call, note, message, stage change, visit, document and payment sits on one timeline, with its date and time, newest first. Whoever picks up the family tomorrow sees exactly where things stand and what was promised.
Follow-ups that come due
Schedule a call, WhatsApp, meeting or visit with a due time and an owner. Overdue follow-ups rise to the top, and closing one asks what happened, so the outcome lands on the family's timeline.
Assignment and response alarm
New enquiries go to counsellors in rotation or wait for a coordinator to assign them. If nobody responds within the window you set, from 5 to 240 minutes, the principal or coordinator is alerted.
Online form and QR codes
A hosted enquiry and application form with your chosen fields, consent text and thank-you message. Download a QR code for each gate standee or prospectus, labelled so you see which placement brought each family.
Campus visit slots
Create visit slots with a limit on families, one at a time or weeks at once. Parents pick a slot themselves, get reminders before the visit, and the front office checks them in on the day.
Applications and documents
A step-by-step online application that saves as the parent types, with uploads for the documents your school asks for. Staff verify each document or send it back with a reason the parent can read.
Offers and registration fees
Send an offer letter PDF with an accept link and expiry date, and a UPI payment link for the registration fee on your school's own Razorpay account. Paid status updates itself once payment is confirmed.
Convert to student
One step turns an accepted application into a student record in the class you pick, carrying over the parent, uploaded documents and extra form answers, with the family's app login on the enquiry mobile number.
Admission analytics
A stage-by-stage funnel with lost reasons, results by source against the spend you enter, a counsellor league table, and a speed-to-lead chart showing how quickly families actually hear back from your school.
Admission enquiry management for walk-ins, calls and the online form
Families reach a school in more ways than any register was built for. A father walks in during his lunch break, a grandmother calls the landline, an elder sibling scans the QR code on the gate standee, and a working mother in Lucknow fills your form at eleven at night. In Inkwelly all of them land in one pipeline, numbered in the order they arrived, tagged with where they came from and assigned to someone who owns the next step, whichever phone happened to ring.
Walk-ins and phone calls, captured at the counter
The walk-in form asks only what the front office can collect while the parent is still standing there: the child's first name, the class, the parent's name, the mobile number and how the family heard about you, plus a note. If that mobile number already belongs to an open enquiry, with or without the +91, the form says so before a duplicate is created and offers to open the existing family. Twins or a second child can still be added separately. Once saved, the office can print an A5 enquiry slip with your school's name and logo, the enquiry number, the assigned counsellor and a short "what happens next" in English and Hindi.
An online admission form parents can finish on a phone
Every school gets its own hosted form link and a downloadable QR code. You choose whether it collects a quick enquiry, the full application or both, and whether the child's date of birth, gender, email, locality and current school are required, optional or hidden. Classes can be opened or closed one at a time. Parents must accept your consent text before submitting, see your own thank-you message, and can switch between English and Hindi if your school uses both. The public form is protected against spam, and a family that submits twice from the same mobile number is added to its existing enquiry instead of becoming a new one.
Sibling radar: the family you already know
A new enquiry is checked against the parents of students already studying with you. If the mobile number, alternate number or email matches a current parent, the counsellor sees the matching child, with the admission number and the parent it came from, and confirms the match or dismisses it. Confirmed siblings stay on the enquiry and are listed again when the child is admitted. That changes the first phone call: instead of a sales pitch, the counsellor can talk about the elder sister's class teacher. A standalone admission tool cannot do this, because it never sees your enrolled families.
Age rules per class, as advice
Each class in an admission season can carry an age rule: a cutoff date, a minimum and maximum age in months and a few days of relaxation. When a date of birth is entered, the counsellor sees whether the child falls inside that range, and parents using the online form see their child's age on the cutoff date. It is advice, never a block, and the enquiry is saved either way. The final call stays with the school, which matters most in years when the entry age for Nursery or Class 1 is being revised in your state.
Admission follow-up and counsellor tracking that doesn't depend on memory
Most admissions are not lost at the first call. They are lost at the third, the one nobody made. A family that enquired in December and was promised a call after the winter break quietly joins another school by mid-January. Inkwelly treats follow-up as the heart of the module, not a reminder feature on the side. Every enquiry has a current stage, an owner, a next follow-up date and a timeline, and the dashboard keeps pointing the team back to families that have gone quiet.
A pipeline from New to Enrolled
Every enquiry sits at one stage: New, Contacted, Visit booked, Visited, Applied, Offered, Admitted, Enrolled, or Lost with a reason. Counsellors move families through the early stages themselves, dragging cards on a board or from the enquiry page. Later stages move on their own: submitting an application moves a family to Applied, an offer to Offered, an accepted offer to Admitted and the final conversion to Enrolled. Marking a family Lost needs a reason, such as fees too high, chose another school, distance, no seats, age not eligible, not responding or postponed. A lost family can be reopened, and it returns to the stage it was at.
The timeline is the handover note
Open any enquiry and the whole story is on one page: when it came in and from where, each call and note, every message sent with its delivery status, visits, the application, documents, offer and payment, each with its date and time. Logging a call on a brand-new enquiry moves it to Contacted by itself, so counsellors don't update the stage separately. If a message could not be sent, the timeline says why. When a counsellor goes on leave in the middle of admission season, the next person reads the timeline and picks up the conversation without calling the family to ask what was discussed.
Round-robin or manual assignment
Each school chooses how new enquiries are shared. In round-robin, they go to counsellors in the order you set, one after another, whether they arrive at the counter, on the phone or through the online form. In manual mode, they wait unassigned until a coordinator picks the right person. Enquiries can be reassigned one at a time or in bulk from the table view, and changing the list of counsellors restarts the rotation from the top. Whenever a counsellor is given a new family, the staff app sends her a notification that opens that enquiry directly, so nothing waits for her to check a screen.
An alarm for enquiries nobody has answered
Speed decides admissions more often than brochures do. Each school sets a first-response window between 5 and 240 minutes. If a new enquiry passes it without a call, note or message, Inkwelly alerts the people you choose, usually the principal or admission coordinator, or the assigned counsellor if you haven't picked anyone. The alert arrives once per enquiry as a staff app notification, and on WhatsApp if your school has connected it, and the timeline records the missed window. The alarm can be limited to working hours, so an enquiry filled at midnight waits for the morning. Until someone responds, the family stays on the dashboard's unanswered list.
Enquiry register and personal WhatsApp vs Inkwelly Admissions & CRM
School visit booking without the phone tag
For most families the campus visit is where the decision gets made. They want to see the classrooms, ask about the bus route and the fee structure, and watch how the staff speak to their child. It is also where schools lose the most time, because fixing one visit takes three calls and a reminder nobody sends. Inkwelly turns visits into bookable slots that parents choose themselves, with reminders, a link to change the booking and a check-in board for the day.
Visit slots the office sets up once
The coordinator creates visit slots with a start time, an end time and the number of families each slot can take, say Saturday mornings from 10 to 11 with room for eight families. Slots can be made one at a time or across a date range in one go: pick the weekdays and time windows, and Inkwelly creates the whole set, skipping slots that already exist. A slot never takes more families than its limit, even when two parents book at the same moment. Slots can be switched off for a holiday, and a slot with bookings can't be deleted until they are cancelled.
Parents book, reschedule or cancel themselves
The enquiry acknowledgement carries a visit booking link. Parents choose a day and time and confirm with the mobile number they gave the school, then get a link to manage the visit: cancelling takes one tap, and picking another slot on the booking page moves it, so a change of plan needs no phone call. Reminders go out a day before the visit and about two and a half hours before it. Counsellors can also book a visit from the enquiry page during a call, from open slots over the next 14 days. Moving a family to another slot cancels the old booking in the same step, so one family never holds two seats.
Visit day: the check-in board
On the day, the front office opens the check-in board and sees every family booked, slot by slot, with the assigned counsellor and a link to the full enquiry. When a family arrives, one tap checks them in and moves the enquiry to Visited. Marking the visit complete sends the parent a follow-up message inviting them to apply, while the family is still talking about what they saw. Families who don't turn up are marked as no-shows without moving them backwards, and cancelling a booking frees the seat. The board works from the staff app too, so whoever is at the gate can check families in on a phone.
- Check a family in with one tap when they reach the gate
- Complete the visit to send the family a follow-up message
- Mark families who never arrived as no-shows, without moving them back
- Cancel a booking to free the seat for another family
- Open the family's full enquiry straight from the board
Online applications that nobody has to retype
An enquiry becomes an application when the family is ready to commit. In most schools this is where the paperwork begins: a printed form taken home and filled in blue pen, photocopies of the birth certificate and Aadhaar stapled behind it, and a clerk typing it all again. Inkwelly moves this online. Parents fill the application on their phone, upload documents as photos or PDFs, and follow its progress on a status page that always shows the next step, while the admission office reviews everything in one place.
A step-by-step form that saves as parents type
The application is broken into short steps: child details, parent details, address and any extra sections your school adds from its own student fields. Answers are saved automatically as the parent moves along, so a dropped network or an incoming call doesn't wipe anything out. A parent who comes back later with the same mobile number continues the same application instead of starting again. The last step shows every answer for a final check before submitting. After submission, the parent receives a confirmation with a link to the application's status page, and the family moves to Applied in your pipeline without anyone touching it.
Documents: uploaded, verified or sent back
Your school picks the documents an application needs from its own document list: birth certificate, Aadhaar, passport-size photographs, the transfer certificate or last report card from the previous school. Parents upload each as a photo or PDF of up to 10 MB, and the application can't be submitted while a required document is missing. Staff open each file and mark it verified, or reject it with a reason such as "Photo is blurred, please re-upload". The parent sees that reason on the status page and uploads a fresh copy for review. Verified documents stay verified when the child becomes a student.
Review decisions that update the pipeline
Submitted applications wait on a review list that can be filtered by status, class and registration fee status, with a count of verified documents on every row. The coordinator starts a review, then makes an offer, puts the family on the waitlist with a position, or rejects the application with a written reason. A family that pulls out is marked withdrawn. Rejected and withdrawn applications move the enquiry to Lost on their own, with the reason recorded, so the pipeline and the lost-reason report never disagree. A waitlisted family can be offered a seat later, the moment one frees up.
What the parent sees
Parents never log in. The status page link opens their application with one line telling them what to do next: finish the form, upload documents, pay the registration fee, wait for the school or accept an offer. Documents show as not uploaded, under review, verified or needing a re-upload. When the school makes an offer, the same page shows it with a button to accept. Internal notes, the counsellor's name and the waitlist position are never shown to the family. Where your school uses Hindi, parents can switch languages at any time, and the page remembers the choice on their phone. It quietly removes the most common admission-season call: "Has my form reached you?"
See one family go from walk-in to confirmed seat
Bring last season's enquiry list and one real class. In a live demo we'll capture a walk-in, book the campus visit, open the application, make the offer and create the student record, on screen, in front of you.
Offers and registration fees on the same trail
The last mile of an admission is where families wait the longest. They have visited, applied and been told a seat is likely, and then nothing happens for a week while the office prepares a letter and someone decides how the registration fee will be collected. In Inkwelly the offer and the fee are two cards on the same application. Both send the parent a link, both update the application the moment the parent acts, and both leave a record on the family's timeline that anyone in the office can check.
Offer letters parents can accept online
Making an offer creates a formal A4 offer letter PDF with your school's name, logo and board affiliation, the child's name, class, application number and the date the offer is valid until. The letter is stored with the application, so the school keeps the exact copy that was sent. The parent receives it with a link to accept, and accepting moves the family to Admitted. An offer runs for seven days unless you set another date or no expiry. If it is still unaccepted 48 hours before expiry, one reminder goes out. Coordinators can extend the offer with a fresh letter, revoke it, or record an acceptance given over the phone.
Registration fees through your own Razorpay account
Set the registration fee once for the school or separately for each class, so Nursery and Class 11 can carry different amounts. When an application is ready, the fee card creates a UPI payment link on the school's own Razorpay account and sends it to the parent. The link can stay valid for 1 to 180 days, and only one link is live per application. When the parent pays, the application changes to Paid by itself and the parent gets a confirmation, with no payment screenshot to check. Staff can copy the link, cancel it or waive the fee. The gateway's own transaction charge applies, at cost.
From applicant to student record, without retyping
The conversion screen opens with a preview of what will be created: the student record, the parent of record, the family's app login, the documents that will attach, the form answers that will copy across and any confirmed siblings. It also lists what must be fixed first. The application must be accepted, the class must exist in the session the child is joining, and a date of birth and gender are asked for only if the enquiry never captured them. If your admission settings generate student IDs and admission numbers automatically, they are created here; otherwise the office types them in.
When it's done, the family receives a welcome message with the admission number and student ID, the enquiry moves to Enrolled, and the child's profile opens in Student Information. Fees stay a deliberate next step: the office creates the fee profile in Student Fee, where the session's fee structures already live. A child joining mid-session can also be admitted directly from Student Information, and our guide to mid-year admissions covers that paperwork.
A school admission CRM that shows where seats really come from
At the end of every season the management asks the same three questions. Which advertising worked? Which counsellor actually converts families? Where did we lose the ones we wanted? Most schools answer from memory and a few WhatsApp screenshots, which is why next year's hoarding budget looks exactly like this year's. The analytics screen answers from the enquiries themselves, for the season you choose, and it is careful to show what it doesn't know rather than hiding the gaps behind confident percentages.
The funnel, and why families were lost
The funnel shows how many families are at each stage right now and what share moved on from each stage to the next, for the whole season or for one class at a time. It is labelled honestly as a projection: a family's current stage is taken as proof it passed the earlier ones, and lost families are reported separately rather than guessed into the stages. Next to it, lost enquiries are broken down by reason, from fees too high and chose another school to distance, no seats, age not eligible, not responding and postponed, with a count of families marked lost without a reason. That last number tells the principal how disciplined the desk has been.
Results by source, against the spend you enter
Every enquiry carries a source: walk-in, phone call, website form, QR code, WhatsApp, referral, Facebook or Instagram ads, Google ads, portals, hoardings and print, events or a pre-school tie-up. For each source the analytics show enquiries, visits, applications and admitted and enrolled families. Type in what the season's hoardings or ads cost, and Inkwelly works out the cost per enquiry and the cost per admission. The spend is entered by hand, because there is no automatic feed from advertising accounts, and the screen says so. It also flags how many enquiries are tagged Other or came from paid ads without campaign details, so gaps in tracking stay visible.
Counsellor league and speed to lead
The counsellor table shows, for each person, enquiries assigned and still untouched, the median time to first response, calls, notes and messages logged, visits completed, and families admitted and enrolled, with a separate row for unassigned enquiries. The speed-to-lead chart sorts first responses into under 5 minutes, 5 to 15 minutes, 15 to 60 minutes, 1 to 24 hours and over a day, and counts enquiries still waiting for any response. Used well, it isn't a stick for counsellors. It tells the principal whether the desk needs another pair of hands in the January rush, and whose habits are worth copying.
Inkwelly Admissions & CRM vs a standalone admission CRM
Optional AI helpers for the admission desk
Schools on the Premium plan, which includes Inkwelly's AI features, get three helpers inside the admission screens. Before a call, a counsellor can ask for a four-to-six point briefing on the family, covering who they are, where they stand, what they asked and a sensible next step, written only from that enquiry's timeline. After a call, she can ask for two follow-up drafts, one for WhatsApp and one for SMS, in English, Hindi or Hinglish. At the counter, she can paste a messy note like "walk-in aaj, mummy Priya Sharma, beta Aarav, class 1, bus chahiye" and the quick enquiry form fills itself for her to check.
The rules are strict. Every output is a draft that a person reads, edits and sends; nothing reaches a parent on its own. The helpers never score or profile a child, never state fees, dates, seat availability or a promise of admission, and leave blank anything they can't find. They can be switched off for a school from its AI settings, and everything else works the same without them.
Built for everyone who touches an admission
An admission passes through more hands than almost anything else a school does. The front office meets the family, the counsellor builds the relationship, the coordinator decides on seats, the accountant watches the registration fees and the principal answers to the management for the final numbers in April. In most schools each of them keeps their own list. In Inkwelly they all work on the same enquiry, each person sees only what their role allows, and nobody has to walk across the office to ask for an update.
For the principal and the owner
Your morning starts with the Admissions dashboard: families nobody has responded to, follow-ups that slipped, today's visits and the funnel by stage. You no longer ask the office for numbers; the analytics show how each class is moving, which sources bring families who actually enrol and which counsellor needs help. When an enquiry goes unanswered past your school's response window, you hear about it the same day through the alarm, not at the end of the month. Offers, rejections and fee waivers each leave an entry on the family's timeline, with the reason where one was given, so decisions about seats can be explained later.
For the admission counsellor and front office
The counsellor's day becomes a list instead of a pile. Today's follow-ups sit on the dashboard with overdue ones first, each linked to the family's timeline. A walk-in takes a short form and prints an enquiry slip. A call is logged in a line, and a new enquiry moves to Contacted by itself. Visits are booked during the call, and the confirmation and reminder go out without anyone remembering to send them. When a family calls back three weeks later, the whole conversation is on one page, and when staff change, the school keeps every family's history.
For the accountant
Registration fees stop being a cash-and-register problem. Each application shows whether a fee applies and whether it is pending, paid or waived, and the review list can be filtered by fee status to see who still has to pay. Links are created on the school's own Razorpay account, so the money settles in the school's account, and the status changes to Paid by itself once the payment is confirmed. A waiver can carry a note and always leaves an entry on the family's timeline. After admission, the regular fee profile is created in Student Fee, so admission money and school fees never tangle in two registers.
For the counsellor on the move
The Inkwelly staff app puts the admission desk in a counsellor's pocket. She can add a walk-in at the gate, with the duplicate check and enquiry slip, and work through the day's follow-ups with tap-to-call and tap-to-WhatsApp, swiping a follow-up done and noting what happened. New assignments arrive as notifications that open the family directly, and visit days run from the same check-in board. Coordinators with the right permissions can review applications, make offers, share fee links and convert an accepted family into a student from their phone, with a lighter analytics view of the funnel, sources and response times.
Messages parents receive, in English and Hindi
Every step of the journey can send the family a short message in English or Hindi: the enquiry acknowledgement with the visit booking link, the visit confirmation and reminders, a follow-up after the visit, the application confirmation with the status page link, the registration fee link and payment confirmation, the offer with its letter and accept link, a reminder before the offer expires, and a welcome message with the admission number. A grandmother in Patna who reads SMS and a father in Pune who lives on WhatsApp get the same information. Staff get their own alerts when an enquiry is assigned to them or goes unanswered.
These messages travel through Inkwelly Communications, so templates, channels and delivery records stay in one place. Each message type can be switched on or off per channel, and the school can adjust the wording. The automatic acknowledgement can be switched off entirely, and families brought in through an imported list are never messaged automatically.
Consent, data protection and who sees what
Admission enquiries hold personal data about children and parents who haven't joined the school yet, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 expects schools to treat it with care. Inkwelly's online form shows your consent text before a parent can submit, and the consent is recorded on the enquiry with how it was given. Documents parents upload open only for signed-in school staff and never sit on a public link, and the form link can be replaced if it ever leaks.
Inside the school, admissions has ten separate permissions, from viewing and managing enquiries to making offers, converting to student, collecting registration fees, changing settings, viewing analytics and exporting. A front-office assistant can capture walk-ins without seeing analytics, and only the people you choose can make offers or waive fees. Everything is hosted on AWS Mumbai with daily encrypted backups, and the school can take a full export in standard formats any time, including on the way out.
Switching from a register, Excel or your current software
Most schools reading this already run admissions somehow: a register, a Google Sheet or the enquiry screen of another ERP. Past enquiries come across through a two-step import. Save the list as a CSV file from Excel, match your column headings to Inkwelly's fields and check the preview before anything is saved, up to 5,000 rows per file. Duplicate mobile numbers are skipped or added to the existing family's timeline, and rows missing a phone number or name are listed with the reason, so an old or bought list comes in clean.
Migration, training and setup cost ₹0, and extracting your data from the current system, or from Excel if the vendor won't cooperate, is on us. Go-live can be the next working day, with older records moving across on their own track. Seats under the RTE Act 2009's 25% quota stay with your state's portal, and our RTE 25% EWS quota guide covers the records they need. Still comparing options? Our buyer guide to online admission software lists the checks worth running in any demo, and you can book a demo to run them on Inkwelly.
“Admissions are rarely lost at the first call. They are lost at the follow-up nobody made.”
What's included with Admissions & CRM
- Admission seasons tied to the session you admit into, with classes opened or closed one at a time
- Per-class age rules shown as advice, and registration fees set per class or for the whole school
- Walk-in enquiry with a duplicate check by mobile number, sibling radar and a printable enquiry slip
- A hosted enquiry and application form in English and Hindi, with QR codes labelled by placement
- Pipeline board and table with filters, bulk assignment and export of the filtered list
- Round-robin or manual counsellor assignment, with a first-response alarm to the people you choose
- Follow-ups with due times and outcomes, and a timeline recording every step with its date and time
- Visit slots with family limits, parent self-booking, reminders and a check-in board
- A step-by-step online application with autosave, document uploads and verification with reasons
- Offer letter PDFs with online acceptance, expiry reminders, extension and revocation
- Registration fee UPI links on your school's own Razorpay account, with cancel and waive
- One-step conversion to a student record, analytics by stage, source and counsellor, and CSV import
Stop losing families between the register and the call back
Bring your admission form, last season's enquiry list and your busiest January week. We'll show how each family would move from first call to confirmed seat in Inkwelly, in a live demo on your own classes.
Frequently asked
14 questionsWhich Inkwelly plan includes Admissions & CRM, and what does it cost?
Admissions & CRM is part of the Standard plan at ₹99 per student per year, and it is also included in Premium at ₹199 per student per year. It isn't part of Lite. Inkwelly's plans run from ₹49 to ₹199 per student per year, flat at any school size, with no enrolment slabs and no per-module upsell, and each plan includes everything in the plan below it. The optional AI helpers for counsellors come with the AI features in Premium. The only external costs are WhatsApp message fees and your payment gateway's transaction charge, both billed at cost.
We use another ERP or an Excel enquiry register today. How hard is it to switch?
Not hard. Past enquiries come across through a two-step CSV import where you match your own column headings, up to 5,000 rows per file, with duplicate mobile numbers skipped or attached to the existing family, and imported families are never messaged automatically. Migration, training and setup cost ₹0, and extracting data from your current system, or from Excel if the vendor won't cooperate, is on us. Go-live can be the next working day, and older records move across on their own track afterwards. You can also start with a 90-day paid pilot on your real data; if it isn't working at day 90, you get a pro-rata refund and your data back in standard formats.
Where is admission data stored, and who in the school can see it?
Everything is hosted on AWS Mumbai with daily encrypted backups. Inside the school, access follows roles: admissions has ten separate permissions, so a front-office assistant can capture walk-ins and log calls without seeing analytics, making offers or waiving fees. Documents uploaded by parents can be opened only by signed-in school staff and never sit on a public link. The consent a parent gives on the online form is recorded on the enquiry. You can take a full export in standard formats whenever you ask, including if you ever leave.
Our admission counsellors aren't comfortable with software. Will they actually use it?
The daily work is deliberately small: a short walk-in form, a list of today's follow-ups and a timeline to read before calling a family. The admission screens are available in English and Hindi, and the staff app lets a counsellor call or WhatsApp a family with one tap and mark a follow-up done with a swipe. We do a full day of on-site training at go-live and stay on WhatsApp through the first month, answered by a person who works on the product, not a ticketing system. If someone on your team is still struggling after that, we come back at no cost.
Do parents need to download an app or create a login to enquire or apply?
No. Parents use the school's form link or scan its QR code, with no login and no OTP. After submitting an application they get a link to a status page that shows the next step, their documents, the registration fee and any offer. The same page lets them upload a document again, pay the fee or accept the offer, and it switches to Hindi where your school uses Hindi. Once the child is admitted, the family's app login is set up on the mobile number from the enquiry.
What happens if the same parent enquires twice, or has twins?
If an open enquiry already exists for that mobile number, the front office sees it before saving, whether or not the number was typed with +91, and can open the existing family instead. For twins or a second child, they can still create a separate enquiry, because each child needs their own application. When a parent submits the online form again from the same number, the submission is added to their existing enquiry instead of creating a new one.
Will parents get WhatsApp and SMS messages automatically?
Yes, once your school has connected its WhatsApp Business number and SMS sender in Communications. Until then those channels don't send, and each enquiry shows why a message didn't go. Parents can receive the enquiry acknowledgement, the visit confirmation and reminders, the application confirmation, the registration fee link and payment confirmation, the offer letter, an offer reminder and a welcome message, in English or Hindi. Each message type can be switched on or off per channel, the automatic acknowledgement can be turned off, and families from an imported list are never messaged automatically.
Can parents book a school visit themselves?
Yes. The admissions coordinator sets up visit slots with the number of families each one can take, and the enquiry acknowledgement carries a booking link. Parents pick a day and time, confirm with the mobile number they gave the school and get a link to cancel, and choosing another slot on the booking page moves the visit. Reminders go out a day before and about two and a half hours before the visit. Counsellors can also book a slot during a call, and on the day the front office checks families in from the web or the staff app.
How is the registration fee collected online?
Through a UPI payment link created on your school's own Razorpay account. The amount can be set for the whole school or per class, and the parent receives the link on WhatsApp or SMS. When the payment is confirmed, the application changes to Paid by itself and the parent gets a confirmation. Staff can copy the link to share again, create a fresh one, cancel it or waive the fee. Regular school fees start after admission in the Student Fee module, where the child's fee profile is created.
Does it handle RTE 25% lottery admissions?
No. Seats under the RTE Act 2009's 25% quota are allotted by the state through its own portal and lottery, so those admissions don't run through this module. Admissions & CRM is built for the admissions your school runs itself, from the first enquiry to the confirmed seat.
Can it pull enquiries from Facebook ads, Google ads or admission portals automatically?
Not today. There is no automatic feed from advertising accounts or listing portals. Enquiries from those channels reach Inkwelly through your online form link, the front desk, or a CSV import of the list a portal gives you, and each one is tagged with its source. Enter what each source cost for the season, and the analytics work out the cost per enquiry and the cost per admission. QR codes can carry a placement label, so you can see which standee or print advertisement brought each family.
Once a child is admitted, do we type the details again into the student record?
No. Converting an accepted application creates the student record in the class you choose, adds the parent from the enquiry, attaches the uploaded documents and copies the answers to your extra form fields. Student IDs and admission numbers are generated automatically if your admission settings are set up that way. The only deliberate next step is creating the fee profile in Student Fee. Schools that admit a child directly, without the enquiry journey, can keep using the admission form in Student Information.
Is the AI safe? Could it message a parent or judge a child?
No. The AI helpers only produce drafts for staff: a short briefing before a call, WhatsApp and SMS follow-up drafts, and a quick enquiry form filled from a pasted note. A person reads and sends everything, nothing goes to a parent on its own, and the helpers never score or profile a child or mention fees, dates or seat availability. They come with the AI features in the Premium plan and can be switched off for your school.
Can each branch of our school group run its own admissions?
Yes. Each school runs its own admission season, pipeline, form link, visit slots and counsellor rotation. A school has one open season at a time, and when a season closes, its enquiries and applications stay on record. Seasons are archived at the end, never deleted, so last year's numbers are always there to compare against.
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